Sep 30, 2012

REVIEW: Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Who
would like to see a really good film about America? One of
the chief virtues of being carpet-bombed by American movies has always been
seeing what the country had been up to lately — how the old girl was
shaping up. She’s been a little absent from screens of late. Sure, we get to
see a generic New York smashed to smithereens every summer, but the giant
vistas that once haunted John Ford, or the jittery streets that kept Martin
Scorsese up nights seem to have faded from cinema screens. Woody Allen sends
postcards home from London, Barcelona, Rome; even Scorsese went Parisian for Hugo; while the hip young auteurs circle
the globe, collecting hosannahs from the international festival circuit: Wes
Anderson’s latest, Moonrise Kingdom,
is his first set on American soil in a decade.

We’ll always have the Coens, of course, quietly at
work stitching together a patchwork quilt of their country — New York
in the 1950s (The Hudsucker Proxy), Los Angeles in the 1940s (Barton Fink),
Mississippi in the 1930s (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?) Minnesota in the
1960s (A Serious Man), Arkansas in the 1880s (True Grit), their quirky charm resting in their ability to see
their country from the outside — strangers in their own land. Something of that mixture enlivens Beasts of the Southern Wild. Made
on a shoestring by a resourceful New Orleans-based collective, and directed by
29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, the film came out of
nowhere to snatch the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Camera d’Or at
Cannes, and rightly so. It’s easily the most original American film of 2012.

It’s
about a black six-year-old named Hush Puppy, played
by newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis, who holds the camera’s attention with an
indomitable poise, a thick thatch of hair, a feral
scowl and a smile that could melt ice-caps. “In a million
years, when kids go to school, they’re gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy,
and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub,” she tells us, blessed with innate
solipsism known to children and narrators of fiction, from Huckleberry
Finn to Terrence Malick’s boys in The
Tree of Life. She acts as if the centre of the known universe. In many
ways, she is. The
film is set in the marshy Louisiana lowland called the Bathtub, whose
hardscrabble inhabitants spend their time fishing, scavenging, breaking open
crabs and drinking moonshine like there’s no tomorrow in rickety, water-logged
shanties built from pieces of old cars and caravans, with occasional breaks to
howl at the moon.

On the outskirts of the swamp sits a city belching
pollution — a grey Oz. There are melting ice-caps, and a flood, and
finally monsters, but none of this amounts to a plot, any more that did the
wanderings of Odysseus. Instead, Zeitlin
tunes into the lyrical voodoo of childhood with a liquid feel for sequence and
consequence: a blow to her father’s chest sounds to Hush Puppy like a
thunderclap. A missing mother sounds her Siren call. This
has to have been the movie playing in Spike
Jonze’s head when he made Where The Wild
Things Are: a howl-at-the-heavens ode to being child king, feet
planted in the mud and mess of America, head filled with myth and magic. Imagine Mad
Max as retold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and you’re halfway there.

Maybe that’s how America should look on screen right now, I thought as I left the theatre. Maybe
that’s the American genre now: magic realism. It used to be realism, at the
movies as much as on the page, but the role of national chronicler has largely fallen
to television these days. In another era, Deadwood,
The Sopranos, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, and Band of Brothers would all have been movies, but the industry that
would have made them is now largely dead. In a recent New York Times article, Michael Cieply noted that of the 20 biggest
hits of last year, only two — Bridesmaids
and The Help —were set in anything
recognizable as North America. In 1992, it was 15 out of 20. It’s one reason the
Academy has gone fishing overseas for its big Oscar winners in recent years — The Artist, The King’s Speech, Slumdog
Millionaire — always reserving a spot on the nominations for something
flinty and home-spun from the indie-world: two year’s ago it was Winter’s Bone, which plunged audiences into
the meth labs of the Ozarks. This year,
it will be Beasts of the Southern Wild.

It’s not entirely free of the romanticism that dogs
the genre, and it is now a genre:
call it the American Exotic, ferrying news from the furthest pits of national
squalor to the comfort of the urban movie house. Zeitlin is a Rousseauist. The
drunken dysfunction of Hush Puppy’s family is lushly ennobled — her father
even refusing medical treatment to keep the corrupting influence of
civilization at bay — but the film gets you with all its glorious rot, like
mud between your toes. It’s a sensory marvel. At one point, Hush Puppy and her
family are fished out of the flood waters and forcible evacuated; such has been
your immersion in the movie’s muck and clutter, that the entire scene, with its
bright antiseptic lights and clean, white orderlies — “Like a fish tank
without any fish” says Hush Puppy — plays like a report from Mars. Actually, no. Just America. Which might be the same
thing, these days.

"The book is a must for Woody Allen fans" - Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

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R E V I E W S

"What makes the book worth taking home, however, is the excellent text... by Tom Shone, a film critic worth reading whatever aspect of the film industry he talks about. (His book Blockbuster is a must).... Most critics are at their best when speaking the language of derision but Shone has the precious gift of being carried away in a sensible manner, and of begin celebratory without setting your teeth on edge." — Clive James, Prospect "The real draw here is Shone’s text, which tells the stories behind the pictures with intelligence and grace. It’s that rarest of creatures: a coffee-table book that’s also a helluva good read." — Jason Bailey, Flavorwire

"There’s a danger of drifting into blandness with this picture packed, coffee-table format. Shone is too vigorous a critic not to put up a fight. He calls Gangs “heartbreaking in the way that only missed masterpieces can be: raging, wounded, incomplete, galvanised by sallies of wild invention”. There’s lots of jazzy, thumbnail writing of this kind... Shone on the “rich, strange and unfathomable” Taxi Driver (1976) cuts to the essence of what Scorsese is capable of." — Tim Robey, The Sunday Telegraph

"A beautiful book on the Taxi Driver director's career by former Sunday Times film critic Tom Shone who relishes Scorsese's "energetic winding riffs that mix cinema history and personal reminiscence".' — Kate Muir,The Times"No mere coffee table book. Shone expertly guides us through Scorsese’s long career.... Shone shows a fine appreciation of his subject, too. Describing Taxi Driver (1976) as having ‘the stillness of a cobra’ is both pithy and apposite.... Fascinating stuff." — Michael Doherty, RTE Guide"An admiring but clear-eyed view of the great American filmmaker’s career... Shone gives the book the heft of a smart critical biography... his arguments are always strong and his insights are fresh. The oversized book’s beauty is matched by its brains”— Connecticut Post

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Click to order

“The film book of the year.... enthralling... groundbreaking.” — The Daily Telegraph

“Blockbuster is weirdly humane: it prizes entertainment over boredom, and audiences over critics, and yet it’s a work of great critical intelligence” – Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Beautifully written and very funny... I loved it and didn’t want it to end.” – Helen Fielding“[An] impressively learned narrative... approachable and enlightening... Shone evinces an intuitive knowledge of what makes audiences respond... One of those rare film books that walks the fine line between populist tub-thumping and sky-is-falling, Sontag-esque screed.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Exhilarating.... wit, style and a good deal of cheeky scorn for the opinions of bien-pensant liberal intellectuals.” – Phillip French, Times Literary Supplement

“Startlingly original... his ability to sum up an actor or director in one well-turned phrase is reminiscent of Pauline Kael’s... the first and last word on the subject. For anyone interested in film, this book is a must read.” – Toby Young, The Spectator

“A history of caring” – Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Smart, observant… nuanced and original, a conversation between the kid who saw Star Wars a couple dozen times and the adult who's starting to think that a handful might have sufficed.” – Chris Tamarri, The Village Voice

"A sweet and savvy page-turner of a valentine to New York, the strange world of fiction, the pleasures of a tall, full glass and just about everything else that matters" — Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan